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WIFI Nightmare

April 16, 2025

Wifi Nightmare on MacBookPro + Arch Linux

The terrible trouble-maker that is the Broadcom brcm43206 wifi chip in the MacBook Pro 14,2— and how I solved the “unfixable” Arch Linux issue.

Humbling experience

For the last month I have been trying to install Arch Linux on my 2017 MacBook Pro 14,3 (the problem child with the recalled keyboard and janky touchbar). Unfortunately, I decided to embark on this journey before I really read up on its linux support. Macs are a crapshoot anyways, and this particular model has some of the worst support.

After booting my Arch ISO, I went to try to connect to WIFI through iwd, as the installation guide suggests. Connection to the internet is a prerequisite to getting anything working, so it was the first stop— And I was there a while…

I did the bulk of my research and testing on vacation with no access to a wired internet connection. I figured that since my networks were showing but I was unable to connect, I needed to download some packages— no wifi made this challenging. Every package has a million different dependencies, and trying to get them all I installed was near impossible. I spent a whole afternoon just going back and forth from OSX to Archiso, and I couldn’t get anywhere with it. Eventually I determined that waiting until I got home to use an USB WIFI adapter.

Live and learn

The hope that a WIFI adapter would work was short-lived. It turns out that most every WIFI card I had needed external drivers to function correctly, and I couldn’t get anywhere without WIFI. I was completely stuck.

Eventually I came across a potential solution. I found on a forum somewhere that some phones support tethering. That is attaching your phone through one of the thunderbolt ports and use its cellular data on your laptop, as a mock ethernet connection. I was super excited to try this out, but hit a wall: I needed drivers for this as well… The iPhone I had required 5 packages (2 + 3 dependencies) to work with tethering. This means that I HAD to install them manually to get this working. I thought “great, right back where I started.” But after a USB transfer and pacman -U install, It worked! I cried a tear of relief.

The fix

Id like to share here how I FINALLY got wifi to work on this Macbook. First of all, make sure you have the exact model as me (the problem child model): MacBook Pro 14,2 (15-inch, 2016). Once we’ve established that you’re officially going to have a terrible time, we can get started with the wifi fix.

Required Equipment

  • iPhone (with cable and hotspot support)
  • 2x USB Flash Drives (one for required .zst files, and another for boot)

Pre-install

  1. Go to the Arch Linux package search and download the .pkg.tar.zst files (and their .sig if you want to verify) for the following from the x86_64 architecture:
    1. libplist
    2. libusbmuxd
    3. libimobiledevice-glue
    4. libimobiledevice
    5. usbmuxd
  2. For each, select “Download from Mirror” to download.
  3. Put all .zst files onto the Flash Drive NOT used for the.
  4. Additionally download brcmfmac43602-pcie.txt, and place on the drive (linux-firmware omits it).

Install Files for iPhone Tethering

  1. Once booted into Archiso, plug in your second USB flash drive, which contains the .zst files.
  2. Check it is detected and find the disk name by running lsblk (mine was /dev/sdb1)
  3. Mount the drive. 
     mkdir /mnt/usb
 mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/usb    # Replace sdX1 with your USB device
 cd /mnt/usb
  4. Install packages with pacman -U *.pkg.tar.zst.
  5. Plug in the iPhone, enable hotspot and make sure its discoverable. The phone should also ask “Trust this computer?”.
  6. Test if its running using systemctl status usbmuxd.service or simply ping archlinux.org to make sure connection is working.
  7. See the result in ip link.

Arch Installation

You will need to continue with the installation to get the main packages and firmware installed. This MacBook Air guide and this Mac Arch install guide are decent guides on how install Arch Linux on a MacBook The main command you NEED to run before getting your Broadcom chip to work is

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel grub-efi-x86_64 linux-headers broadcom-wl-dkms wpa_supplicant dialog vim git reflector linux linux-firmware gdisk`
genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

These are all (and a few additional) packages you will need, including the base linux files and firmware.

Get brcm43602 working

  1. First make sure your particular device matches Broadcom BCM43602.
  2. According to the official documentation, you need to add this kernel parameter. We will add it to rEFInd because that is our bootloader. Simply append brcmfmac.feature_disable=0x82000 to the end of each boot option.
  3. Also, based on this resource, this particular MacBook Pro’s Broadcom WIFI driver has many recognized issues. We need to fix that driver using brcmfmac43602-pcie.txt file.
    1. Mount your Flash drive (ex. mount --mkdir /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb) then: 
      cp brcmfmac43602-pcie.txt /lib/firmware/brcm #copy .txt file from earlier 
rmmod brcmfmac_wcc && modprobe brcmfmac reset=1 # reset brcmfmac
  4. You might need to disable conflicting network managers, like in my case I had only IWD running.
  5. After I connected using IWCTL I finally got a working connection! Hallelujah!

    NOTE: linux-firmware should install the rest of the files and directory under /brcm. If it is missing, you might need to reinstall linux-firmware and linux-headers. Additionally, you might need to rebuild sudo mkinitcpio -p linux.

Conclusion

Linux has been a super fun but ridiculously frustrating experience. Now that I have gotten wifi to work, Hyprland installed, and started ricing, It looks like this is just the beginning— and its mostly because of my hardware. I think that I will just pursue MacOS ricing instead, which is something I just learned existed. Eventually I will plan to get a dedicated laptop FOR linux like the Thinkpad T480.

Anyways, happy creating…and hang in there!